The ascent of Pan

Geraldine McCaughrean is the latest writer to take on the onerous task of updating one of the classics of children's literature. So how does her Peter Pan in Scarlet match up to the original, asks Kate Kellaway

'On these magic shores, children at play are for ever beaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more ...'

JM Barrie's words about Neverland might be taken as an elegiac prohibition. Wendy was allowed back from time to time to do a spot of spring-cleaning for Peter Pan, but not once she had become an adult. Yet in the popular imagination, Neverland is Alwaysland and there has been no shortage of grown-up writers hoping to land on its shores again (this year, American humorist Dave Barry, with suspense writer Ridley Pearson, offered up Peter and the Starcatchers, a 'prequel', and Peter and the Shadow Thieves for Walker Books).

The latest and most significant author to disembark is Geraldine McCaughrean. Her publishers and Great Ormond Street Hospital, to whom JM Barrie bequeathed the copyright to Peter Pan in 1929 and for whom the royalties have been an important source of income, exude confidence at having McCaughrean as captain. She won a competition against more than 200 entrants to write this sequel to Peter Pan in the book's centenary year; the result looks rather like a prize with its dashing scarlet cover, its flying colours.

Grafting a sequel on to a much-loved classic is a dangerous enterprise, but I wondered whether Peter Pan might not prove just the book for it? Certainly, from the first page, there is no doubting McCaughrean's ability. She introduces us, entertainingly, to Judge Tootles, Dr Curly, Mr Nibs and the Honourable Slightly, who moonlights as a clarinettist in a nightclub. These old men are prey to bad dreams about Neverland. The dreams deposit souvenirs in their beds - cutlasses, eyepatches, tricorns, the brackish smell of mermaids.

By the time a crocodile has materialised in the club library, it has become evident that something is badly wrong: Neverland is leaking. Mrs Wendy, ever conscientious, decides to go back with the original gang. But to do so, they must become young again and squeeze into their children's clothes (fastest route to regression). They need also to encourage a baby to laugh for the first time (Barrie's fairy-hatching recipe) to produce the dust necessary for flying.

It must be mentioned at this point - lest the thought fly off - that when it comes to fairies, McCaughrean has the Knowledge. It is the thing I love most about her book. Her authoritative descriptions make JM Barrie's Tinkerbell seem sketchy. Here is a first sighting of the fairy secured by the old gentlemen in Kensington Gardens: 'Among banks of orange aubretia, beside the war memorial, they caught him - a tiny, blueish mite, with red hair and eyes the colour of honey - a fairy.' Wendy is so delighted with their catch that she wants to name it 'Con brio'.

'Con brio' is right for McCaughrean, too. Sensibly, she gives herself permission to write freely by letting us know, from first sighting, that Neverland appears 'totally and completely and utterly and absolutely ... changed'. Peter has been bored (who wouldn't be?) in the long interlude between books. He is as cocky as ever, but his dress is altered: he wears sinister orange apparel decorated with jay feathers. But at the same time as staking a claim for making the book her own, McCaughrean has done her homework meticulously, so that not a dropped stitch escapes her. At the end of Peter Pan, we were told that the Wendy House was about to be relocated in a tree. McCaughrean is as good as JM Barrie's word. The Wendy House reappears in the top of a 'Never Tree'.

What happens next? The short answer is far too much. There is, for instance, not one dragon here but a crowd (I'm not sure what the collective noun is). To each boy, a dragon of his own. It is overkill - in every sense. A circus is introduced, with marauding bears and a sinister circus master called Ravello, with long, woollen sleeves (what he keeps up them will come as a shock). Ravello is admirably drawn, but there is a growing sense that McCaughrean is becoming a driven circus mistress herself, offering us one stunt after another, nonstop performance.

The lagoon, beautifully envisaged as a kind of collective unconscious, is described with Daliesque virtuosity: 'The lagoon she saw now was darkly heaving: a horse's flank slick black and streaked with foam. A mane of washed-up seaweed lay among the pebbles busy with flies. All along the high watermark lay strange white containers like birdcages or crab pots. On closer inspection, they proved to be the skeleton ribcages of mermaids, with here and there a hank of yellow hair.'

McCaughrean has dreamt up a busy odyssey in which her best innovation, her masterstroke, is the Grief Reef, a landscape made up of broken prams and distraught mothers looking for the fallen children they lost long ago. But elsewhere, the sense is that she has too much to prove, that she is reluctant to slow down for a second lest she discover what I think in our hearts we already knew - that she was not supposed to be in Neverland at all.

Perhaps the most satisfactory side effect of this brilliant failure of a book is that it sends one curiously back to the original (the one safe way of returning to Neverland) and it is then that one sees exactly what is awry and why any sequel is a doomed enterprise. It is JM Barrie's strangeness that makes Peter Pan the book it is. The writing is often offhand, irritable, unpredictable. It is a voice no one could parody (and it would be a mistake to try). Yet without it, you are lost. Hardest of all to reproduce is JM Barrie's ambivalent attitude to his characters, his mixed messages about them. He had a way of making us insecure about who - and how - to love.

This was an ambivalence at the heart of his psyche. To say that JM Barrie, son of a Scottish weaver, was a 'one-off', would be an understatement. He was more celebrated, as an Edwardian writer, than any contemporary; he made a stab at convention, but his marriage was unhappy, unconsummated and did not last. The people he loved most in the world, aside from his mother, were the five sons of Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, most of all George and Michael. He invited himself into their lives and, after their parents' deaths, became their guardian, paying their way (fees to Eton, expensive holidays). He cast himself as mother and father. But he was neither. This was not parenthood, but romance: ardent, generous, disturbing and, for some of the Llewelyn Davies boys, distinctly one-sided. And it ended in tragedy (George was killed in the First World War; Michael drowned himself).

Barrie's ideal of boyhood was strange, for he revelled not only in innocence but in heartlessness (one of his favourite words). We are encouraged to find Peter Pan odious - conceited, noisy, self-centred. Tinkerbell is similarly horrid, and yet they are both insolently heroic and we are also intended to glory in them. Wendy can seem a prig, as tediously domestic as a flapping tea towel. But she is a fascinatingly contradictory heroine. She is so collected that it amounts to emptiness - a lost girl.

Ambivalence about mothers dominates (McCaughrean's take on mothers is more sane). Are they beloved and necessary? Or oppressively surplus to requirements? In Peter Pan, Mrs Darling is dispatched to oblivion in a single line: 'Mrs Darling was now dead and forgotten.' And there is no mistaking JM Barrie's satisfaction in this sentence. Even the dog, Nana, gets a better send-off.

But when it comes to Captain Hook, it is a different story. JM Barrie was half in love with his villain and tempts us to feel the same. There are yards of ruefully approving adjectives about him. Hook is 'subtle', 'brave', 'distingué'. He loves flowers. He performs well on the harpsichord. The point - the seductive genius of it - is that you never know where you are with any of these characters. With Geraldine McCaughrean, you know exactly where you are - and at the book's weakest moments, you enjoy no more than an extended literary in-joke.

Barrie, on the other hand, was seldom funny. His jokes (Mr Darling in the kennel) had an upsetting, sadistic edge. And strangest of all, something conscientious Geraldine McCaughrean would never evince, he had an intemperate attitude to his readers and to himself, describing us all as follows: 'That is all we are, lookers on. Nobody really wants us. So let us watch and say jaggy things, in the hope that some of them will hurt.'

Barrie and his boy

Born: 9 May 1860 in Kirriemuir, Angus.

Died: 19 June 1937.

Barrie suffered from psychogenic dwarfism, which meant that he stopped growing and never reached puberty. His adult height was 4ft 10in. His elder brother, David, died in an ice-skating accident when Barrie was seven.

Peter Pan had its first stage performance on 27 December 1904. The first film version came 20 years later. Disney's Peter Pan was released in 1954.

It is traditional for the actor playing Mr Darling, the children's father, to play Hook as well, to highlight the similarities between both characters.

Peter Pan has been translated into more languages than any other book apart from the Bible.